Teachers - part 2

So, here we go with the first great teacher in my life.


Mrs Killock


I don’t know what happened to the music teacher that came before Mrs Killock in junior school but I do know she was quite an old lady and one day she was no longer there. She taught us all the old classic songs that still seem obligatory to learn as a child even now – ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, ‘Doh, a Deer’ and some African jingle in words no one understands just to be ‘culturally appropriate’ so on. She was, in many ways, the worst kind of music teacher because the kids loved her and loved singing the songs and so never realised that we had learned nothing. We enjoyed it because it was an easy lesson – but we learned that music was not a subject to be taken seriously. I see many music teachers doing the same today despite the fact the in the UK we have a national curriculum to prevent this. The children have no idea that they are learning nothing because they are always singing new songs and think this constitutes learning – it doesn’t, it’s just called practice. I don’t want to belittle singing – rightly, it is there in the curriculum too because of the importance it has. I don’t want any singing teacher to think I dismiss it’s value. But oddly, I think such singing lessons have killed off choirs in the UK. Why?


Well, we should have learned from history. Specifically, the mistake the UK made over recorders.


The Plague of Recorders


After the Second World War there was a shortage of metal and, as a result, of instruments in the UK. A need for cheap instruments meant that the recorder (a simple, cheap instrument made from wood) became the school instrument of choice. Millions of children learned to play it extremely badly and most hated it after the initial fun of honking a few notes through it. The rest, who had potential talent, tended to think of it as a ‘child’s’ instrument and moved on to more ‘adult’ instruments like the flute or clarinet as they reached high school. The result was that the recorder, as a serious instrument with hundreds of years of tradition behind it has all but died. In nearly 20 years of teaching I have only ever met one student who took it as a serious instrument and had reached grade 8 by the time she finished her GCSEs. In making use of this instrument’s good points we killed it off. Hunted it to near extinction, if you like.


Singing in schools is having the same affect. Many kids hate it or, at least only tolerate it for the ‘free ride’ it offers for a handful of minutes. Those that like it usually only do because they see the lesson as a chance to ‘get out of doing any real work’. As a result, few go on to more serious choirs at high school age and very few ever think of joining a choir as adults. Once, in the UK, every town boasted a choir. Now, only a few do and most of those are struggling.


Well, Mrs Killock was totally different.


She got us on recorders admittedly (but the previous one had not even done that) and actually tried complicated arrangements with us. She did still get us singing which is fine I guess especially as the songs were more serious and less ‘childlike’. Actually, she varied the lessons really well in this respect long before ‘variety of pace’ was a buzzword amongst teachers. But it is not for these reasons I remember her.


Ludwig Von Beethoven


One day she started teaching us about Beethoven. She taught us about his life and played us recordings of his music. She taught us about his three periods of work and why each was different. And she expected us to learn and remember. There was to be a quiz.


I was hooked. I had never known about musical history before. I had never realised that composers had a story and led fascinating lives. Suddenly the music made sense instead of being boring. I understood that ‘fate was knocking on the door’ in the 5th symphony because Beethoven was going deaf, I understood why the 3rd was ‘heroic’ because originally it had been dedicated to Beethoven’s hero Napoleon. I was fascinated by the twist in the tale that Beethoven had scribbled out the dedication afterwards when Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and became a traitorous villain in Ludwig’s mind. I got a chance to glimpse into the soul of a tortured man for the first time.


I worked liked crazy for that quiz and when it came I answered the questions confidently. When she gave the results back and I was top of the class, both she and I were surprised (I had never shown any ability in class before let alone interest in music - I didn’t think I had any interest myself). This was something I could do. I could learn, I could read, I could understand. I had always thought music was just something you could either ‘do’ or ‘not do’. Now I knew I could, at least, learn to appreciate it if nothing else.


And that one event was enough to keep me interested during three pretty dreadful years that followed at high school (a story for another time involving unrequited love, death and betrayal) until I decided that I really wanted to learn music properly.


Variety is the spice of life


As a teacher I look back and realised that Mrs Killock was the first music teacher to give us variety of task. Instead of spending 40 minutes singing a small selection of songs a couple of times each week, we sang, played, learned to read music a little, learned history. We dipped our toes in the water of musical learning. I’m sure some hated the history, but loved the singing. I was the other way around. The point was that there was something for everyone.


I’ve learned in my own teaching that you can never please everyone all the time. I used to think that kids only wanted to learn about pop and rock music but soon found that when I actually taught modules on this more arguments broke out amongst the kids than with anything else. If I played rock then half the class would complain loudly. If I played pop then the other half would complain instead. Oddly, if I played classical and made it interesting – told them the story behind the music as Mrs Killock had done – then I never got complaints at all. They could see the point even if this was not the kind of music they normally chose to listen to.


Take up a hobby today


So, these days, I give variety where possible and I try to put variety in my own life too. I recommend it to anyone really. Life is too short to focus on only one thing or become so obsessed with work you have no room for anything else. I’ve just taken up Japanese for that reason despite being overloaded with learning Bangla and a few other useful languages. I’m doing it just for fun, for a few minutes each day with a Japanese friend giving me a little help once a week. No pressure, no tedious hours spent on it, just something new.


If you haven’t already done so, I warmly recommend you take up a hobby. Not to be good at it, just to do something a little different in your life. 10 minutes a day doing something new. It has become recognised in the Business world as well as many other places that some kind of activity that is purely for enjoyment is good for you and makes you are better employee. More importantly, if it involves physical as well as mental activity then there are many health benefits for you too. Sport, painting, juggling – anything really. You could even take up an instrument.


But maybe not the recorder. Please.